Introduction to social network analysis

Social network analysis (SNA) can be used to analyse patterns of information and knowledge flow, enabling the identification of individuals playing important structural roles within a network, such as bottlenecks and boundary spanners, as well as subgroups such as cliques.

Dr Cooke provided a taster of what she intends to cover in this presentation in her pre-event interview post, which also includes a useful list of background reading materials. Please use the event hashtag #lis_dream2 to follow discussion around this event as it happens via Twitter.

The good news is that SNA is not all about maths or noodling with Google spreadsheets - data collection is only the first stage. An analysis of workshop participants was undertaken as part of the session, which it is planned to repeat at the end of the project to help assess impact.

Initial findings from the workshop exercise were that the network was fairly well connected, with 20 cliques/clusters. The acquaintanceship network was slightly more connected than the knowledge and expertise network: